Software service handoff mechanism with a performance reliability improvement mechanism (PRIM) for a collaborative client-server system

Abstract

A collaborative client-server system having performance reliability improvement (PRIM) includes collaboration techniques for sharing server data among two or more servers, each server coupled to one or more client computers. A communication link between a client computer and a server is handed off to another respective one of the two or more servers under a variety of conditions. Hand off conditions include, congestion of the server processing load, congestion of the communication link between the client computer and the server, and loss of data signal integrity between the client computer and the server.

Description

CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS[0001]This application claims the benefit under 35 U.S.C. §119(e) of application No. 60 / 285,861 filed Apr. 23, 2001 and application No. 60 / 285,797 filed Apr. 23, 2001. Both of these applications are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety.STATEMENT REGARDING FEDERALLY SPONSORED RESEARCH[0002]This invention was made with government support under Contract No. CMS-987557 awarded by the National Science Foundation. The government has certain rights in this invention.FIELD OF THE INVENTION[0003]This invention relates to client-server systems having a collaboration and in particular to multi-server client-server systems that share data amongst the multi-servers, and to communication link handoff between clients and servers during a collaboration.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0004]Conventional client-server computer systems provide coupling between one or more client computers and a server computer. In such systems, the server computer is pro...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0019]With this particular arrangement, the coupling between a client computer and selected collaboration server can be handed off to another collaboration server during an interaction session upon determination of the factors listed above. In particular, if a collaboration server becomes unavailable, the client computer with which it is coupled can be handed off to another collaboration server without any delay and without any loss of data.

Problems solved by technology

With a single-server configuration, it will be recognized that if the single server becomes congested, all of the one or more client computers connected to the single server will suffer slow operation.

When a star configuration is used in a collaboration session, data throughput, both in processing speed and in communication link bandwidth, from a single server to all the client computers coupled thereto in the collaboration session, can deteriorate as the quantity of data to be shared becomes greater.

In particular, both application software sharing and video broadcasting from a single server require substantial processing speed and communication link bandwidth.

However, single-server architecture may not provide sufficient processing speed for computing platforms that depend upon the server for some processing functions, particularly when then server must service several clients simultaneously.

Wireless communication links are known to have variable bandwidth, unpredictable data error rates including dropouts, and unpredictable ranges.

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